The Subtle Social Component
by Pinkie Tuscadaro
Summary: Sheldon's violent childhood and his mother's comfort.


Being smart, being a genius in the mid eighties in east Texas meant one thing. You got beat up a lot. Being nerdy and smarter than anyone else wasn't cool. Cool was cool. Rebels were cool, trendy clothes and sunglasses and the latest brand of sneakers and jeans were cool. Playing video games was cool, but knowing how to write the programs for the video games was hopelessly dorky. Knowing how to fight was cool. Being good at football was cool. Sheldon was not cool.

He wore whatever clothes his mother bought for him at K-Mart, while his older brother and twin sister scraped up their odd job money and went to the malls and got the cool clothes. Sheldon didn't care about it, was incapable of caring about his clothes, and he wore plaid pants when everyone else wore jeans, and he wore shirts with collars when everyone else wore T-shirts. His stiff posture and his awkward way of speaking, and his tendency to say things no kid his age could possibly understand irritated most kids and angered others. When some kids were having a bad day it was a nice stress release to beat up that super nerd Sheldon Cooper.

There was a point in the late eighties when his life was filled with violence. His teachers didn't know what to do with him, he seemed to know more about any subject matter than they did. Some of them looked at him in awe and let him read his college physics textbooks while the rest of the kids did their lessons. Some of them were annoyed with him and demanded that he do their lessons like the rest of the kids and in those classes he hid books in his desk and read those in between being interrupted to give some answer that he didn't even have to think about.

People were very mysterious to him. The mathematical formulas he was working with had constants, and things had an order that he gravitated to. People, on the other hand, were apt to do anything. Being almost wholly unable to read facial expressions and tones of voice and being unable to infer anything from those clues, Sheldon could never tell when he was aggravating other kids with explanations of the simple science that was all around them. He never knew when a group of cool boys would suddenly grab him and twist his arm behind his back and give him a swift kick to the stomach and leave him writhing on the ground.

At home, the smell of bourbon emanating from the containers his father would drink from, Sheldon couldn't recognize the slurring speech and the petulant anger that meant it was better to get out of the room. His sister and older brother had learned to recognize the signs of the drunkenness turning mean, but Sheldon couldn't see it. He couldn't understand that when his father's eyes had the half closed bleariness it wasn't the best time to explain the new concepts he was discovering day by day, hour by hour.

He did his experiments and built his cat scanners, and mostly he would shrug off the black eyes and the beatings from the other kids, the bullies, the cool kids. He knew enough to follow his sister and brother's lead and leave the room when they did if their father was reeking of bourbon and ranting about lost opportunities and the religious zealousness of his wife.

One person in his life didn't hurt him. Only one. His mother would see the injuries from the other kids and knew there was no real way to stop it, and she would look up and ask God if she was really able to handle this child prodigy who had been thrust into her life. She would smooth back his hair and ice the injuries and sing soft kitty, and she'd try to tell him a little bit about not angering the other kids. He would look at her blankly, this child who could do mathematical equations at age nine, equations she had never even knew existed. This child who could read at age 2 ½, and who remembered everything. He would remember what she was telling him right now, and he would be able to state the exact date and the weather conditions of this moment decades from now, but he didn't understand what she was saying. There was a subtle social component to life that she couldn't seem to get through to him.

Mary looked at her son, his pale blue eyes ringed in the purple bruises because he didn't understand the social milieu. She knew that he may never fully get it, and the more time he spent in the grip of the violence of ignorance and misunderstandings would only damage him further. So she made the decision to let him start high school at nine, and hopefully he would be too young and too odd for the high school students to bother with, and then he'd be off to college where he would still be abnormally young and odd. In high school and college his youth would protect him, and he wouldn't suffer through bullies and the beatings anymore.


End file.
